Can someone explain to a dense old gheezer...

[gunnergoz]

howinheck I'm supposed to figure out the excess stability for my cities? I can't make heads or tails out of the information I read under the stability part of the city UI. It changes turn to turn but I've not yet figured out what the various numbers actually mean in terms of how much more instability I can add to the city (in the form of districts, say) before I start dropping from where it is presently at.
I'm no accountant, explanations that include puppet shows are not ruled out.

 

[Aristos]

The UI is a little lacking in that specific sense right now, lacking a balance of stability number (how much above 100 your city is), and also a tooltip to display exactly how much instability a new district would add (although that is partially covered by the map tooltip).

At this point, I quickly sum up the components to get a summary number and then estimate the impact of a new district. It's not exact, but neither is the impact, unless your city is already low on stab, but in that case, you shouldn't be prioritizing net negative stab builds anyways...

 

[fortydayweekend]

There's a value in the hover tooltip called "Stability as Base Value"

Everything you build that costs stability adds to that number. It can go up to +40 before you start dropping from 100.

So if you have Base Value 34 and build a -10 stability district, that would go up to 44. The maximum is 40 so 4 would be taken off 100 and you have 96 stability.

I think of it as "spare stability": 40 minus the Base Value = the amount you can build before you start dropping from 100.

If the Base Value is negative then you have that amount plus 40 as spare. E.g. 40 - (-100 Base value) = 140 spare stability to spend.

It's opaque and seems like they're just unnecessarily trying to make the game harder to work out, but it's not too hard once you get used to looking at the Base Value. Basically just build a stability building whenever that gets to 30+ and you'll be fine for building districts. (Attaching territories or cities you might want it to be lower depending on what you're doing.)

 

[Victoria]

Just as a side note, I played a game pushing my cities down to under 50 stability to max out early districts at the cost of influence and it did feel like the events were worse than when I was above 90, but not significantly so. I do like the mechanic but seems quite mild.

 

[Siptah]

Just as a side note, I played a game pushing my cities down to under 50 stability to max out early districts at the cost of influence and it did feel like the events were worse than when I was above 90, but not significantly so. I do like the mechanic but seems quite mild.

I read somewhere that stability above 90 makes negative events unlikelier, while stability below 30 makes negative events likelier. So it's not just "feel," but a definite. I agree that it could be more pronounced.

 

[Victoria]

I read somewhere that stability above 90 makes negative events unlikelier, while stability below 30 makes negative events likelier. So it's not just "feel," but a definite. I agree that it could be more pronounced.

Yes, it is all in the wiki, their wiki is pretty good apart from the damn spam adds, best money I ever spent was not seeing adds on this site.

 

[Aristos]

I read somewhere that stability above 90 makes negative events unlikelier, while stability below 30 makes negative events likelier. So it's not just "feel," but a definite. I agree that it could be more pronounced.

It's right there in the stab tooltip in city view.

Between 30 and 90, both good and bad events have equal chances, so the overall impression might be that they are "mildly worse" than being above 90.
I have yet to see what happens under 30 because I never let my cities go down like that, besides occupations, but even then I prioritize recovering stab asap. Would be interesting to know what type of events fire and their severity, from people that have experienced under 30 cities...

 

[gunnergoz]

There's a value in the hover tooltip called "Stability as Base Value"

Everything you build that costs stability adds to that number. It can go up to +40 before you start dropping from 100.

So if you have Base Value 34 and build a -10 stability district, that would go up to 44. The maximum is 40 so 4 would be taken off 100 and you have 96 stability.

I think of it as "spare stability": 40 minus the Base Value = the amount you can build before you start dropping from 100.

If the Base Value is negative then you have that amount plus 40 as spare. E.g. 40 - (-100 Base value) = 140 spare stability to spend.

It's opaque and seems like they're just unnecessarily trying to make the game harder to work out, but it's not too hard once you get used to looking at the Base Value. Basically just build a stability building whenever that gets to 30+ and you'll be fine for building districts. (Attaching territories or cities you might want it to be lower depending on what you're doing.)

Thank you very much! That is exactly the sort of information I was seeking!